In these staged
photographs the Rükenfigur of Caspar David Friedrich’s
"Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (1818) is used. The
figure is placed in a park-like area in the large residential
district Lasnamäe in Tallinn, Estonia. The park is a former
dumpsite from Soviet times when the suburb was built. It is
a big open space with no name, a culture-nature-culture takeover
in the making.
In Out of Site. Landscape and Cultural Reflexivity in New
Hollywood Cinema 1969-1974, Henrik Gustafsson writes about
the work:
“The exhibit adresses a number of key tenets in landscape
studies; how certain compositional elements – the lateral
form, the repoussoirs, and the twilight implement unity and
depth, but also how landscape was developed in tandem with an
ideology of bourgeois individualism that instigated alienation
not only by standing apart from a communal experience but also
apart from nature. In the Romantic tradition, this faceless,
silhouetted figure, conventionally understood as a surrogate
for the spectator, silently transfixed before a horizon dividing
land and sky became an ubiquitous device for evoking the sublime.”